Gamblin Traditional Gesso

Since 1980, Gamblin has handcrafted luscious oil colors and contemporary painting mediums that are true to historic working properties, yet safer and more permanent. All of Gamblin's oil painting materials are handcrafted at the company's wind-powered factory in Portland, Oregon. This is a paint you can trust for permanence and studio safety — from the industry leader.

Traditionally, gesso (Italian for "gypsum") was applied only to panels. Gamblin's Traditional Gesso is a classic absorbent ground for oil panels which, when mixed with water, forms a luminous painting surface.

Use it to recreate the traditional supports and surfaces used by panel painters for hundreds of years. Gamblin Traditional Gesso is a dry, powder mixture which includes Rabbit Skin Glue crystals. The RSG acts as the binder in the gesso when it is mixed with water.

Robert Gamblin recommends applying four coats of this traditional gesso to both sides of thin or poorly braced panels. Gamblin Traditional Gesso is too brittle to use with fabric supports.

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I use Gambling traditional gesso to prepare my panels for egg tempera painting. Being careful not to overheat or over stir the gesso I get excellent results. The finished gessoed panels have just the right amount of absorbency for my initial egg tempera coats and I've never had a panel fail me since using Gambling traditional gesso several years ago. I've been preparing my own panels for over 33 years except for a few that I purchased in the 90's, some of which cracked after I applied several layers of paint. I feel much more secure preparing my own birch panels with this product.

We all try to do our best out here! We are told that you can only do as good as your tools will allow you... So we all go looking for the tools based on recommendations, always worried they will be too expensive, as well... Well, so far, ANYTHING I have needed, I found it here, and at a remarkable price... And it arrives wonderfully packed and post haste! Of course I am very impressed and thank you!!

This product helps produce an excellent surface for underpainting. After 5 layers of rabbit skin glue on a panel, it was nice to have rabbit skin glue already contained in the separate gesso packets. The titanium white is a nice additive, but I also added a sprinkle of bentonite for a smooth and hard surface. One disadvantage of the prepackaged mixes of this product is that one could easily mix more gesso than needed for smaller pieces.

This is wonderful for making my own panels for oil painting. It affords a vellum finish to mimic watercolor paper. You need to adjust the amount of water used, I add more, depending on the weather when you mix the power. I greatly prefer the finish to ready-made gesso.

I use this Gesso for Byzantine Iconography with egg tempera and have coated numerous panels of all kinds with it. I have never had any problems of any sort with it that I cannot count as being my own fault. making your own Gesso can be a very painful task in that you likely will make a terrible mess and a bad batch, not to mention problems with the panel. This pre-made gesso takes all the worry out of gessoing. You still have to warm it up in a double boiler, but that is as hard as it gets. I love it, and for my studio, it is the only gesso I use.